2
Can I even begin to phrase how hard I began to re-believe in my life? How his bedroom is forever preserved in my memory as a centre of peace? Christopher had a big studio on Corydon with purple curtains and gentle traffic sounds and a neighbour who watched cable news that came through the walls as a burbling lull 24/7. For many months, when I stayed over at Christopher’s house, he would get up, make coffee, and kiss me, still sleeping in the bed, before he went to work. I lived between that apartment and my mother’s house, doing nothing. He didn’t seem to mind (something I would later realize I took for granted). It sounds chaste saying it now, though it wasn’t. We fucked against buildings, and I went with him to parties. God, he liked to drink, almost as much as I had in the old days, but that part wasn’t even hard. Once everybody knew I was sober and wasn’t trying to get me to drink, parties got fun! It was a kick to be around drunks and see so clearly now what was happening to them.
And sober sex. Do you know that had never happened before, either? It was in fucking Christopher that I felt my body flower and come back to me. I felt my skin as a real part of the world. It was weird. Sex became not something that I tolerated, or even assented to, but a thing I wanted and liked. It felt like the same restless and tingling part of me that stayed up late as a kid. A ghostly hand touching my insides, bringing something back to me about desire.
“You know, I only ever dated one other girl in my life,” he said one night, after we’d made love. The moon was out and tinged his red hair a pale blue. A car’s shadow from the street washed over the room.
“Really,” I said.
“We dated for four years,” he said, staring straight up from his pillow. “She had a kid, a little daughter.”
I propped myself up on my elbow. “Why’d you break up?” I didn’t mind hearing this stuff, and it wasn’t unprecedented. We liked filling each other in on the vast blankness of what had happened during the past half of our lives.
“She fell out of love with me,” he said.
“That’s cold.”
“No, it’s fine,” Christopher said. “I mean, it was awful, and it dragged out too long. But she didn’t have the guts to leave me. And I wanted to believe she still loved me. It happens all the time.”
“I see.”
“Not that I’d know, I guess,” he added. “The sample size is n=1, as they say.”
“Dating blows. You didn’t miss much. How’d you meet?”
He hesitated. “Speed dating.”
“What? That still exists?”
“It was in Fort Garry,” he laughed. “It wasn’t even at a bar or anything, it was so awkward. But we ended up liking each other. They give you a little piece of paper and they call you up if you marked each other as a match. We went on one date afterward and then it was just normal.”
“No shit.”
“Did you ever date girls, too?” he asked. “I mean, after you—after you—”
It never fails to amaze me, in a fond, quiet way, how boys can touch and fuck a transsexual body then stammer their way through any implication of how that body got there. I don’t know why I have a soft spot for that, but I do. “I’ve never dated a woman,” I said. “Except in high school, once. I hooked up with girls a few times and it was fun. I never really dated men, either, to be honest. I didn’t have many relationships as an adult, period.” Any relationships, I didn’t say.
We lay there in the moonlight. I’d never felt so calm. I felt like the first thirty years of my life were slipping into place and closing. We were very quiet for a while, but he wasn’t sleeping.
“What I can tell you,” I said, “is the first time I slept with a man. It was right after I moved east. This was in Toronto. I wasn’t in a good place. I worked with this boy and I lived in a shithole just east of downtown. Even today it’s a rough corner. Anyway. This boy, Will, he asked if I wanted to hang out. Twice I went over to his house and we watched TV, got drunk. We talked long into the night. Both times I expected—like, I thought: He’s hitting on me, right? This is how this works, this is how it ends up, right? But then around 1:00, 2:00 a.m. he’d say all abrupt that he had to get to sleep, had to get up early for work, see ya. I was like, I work at the same place, bitch! But whatever. The third time I go over again. Will says he’s gonna make tacos and he’s got a two-six of whiskey. I brought a six-pack. And right away, he says he broke up with his girlfriend the weekend before, so he’s all emotional. I was like, Ah, OK, here we go. He put bacon in the tacos. I told him to eat some of the spare bacon and take a shot of whiskey. We called them bacon chasers. I have a picture of me, still, that he took that night. I’ve got a flip phone and I’m wearing this stupid scarf. I look mad for some reason. But I was really happy.
“Anyway. Eventually the whiskey and the beer go and we are fucked up. And then I kiss him and he’s surprised! I don’t know. But he’s into it, and we have sex, and let me tell you, baby, it was bad, like it was nooooot good. I’ll spare the unsavoury details but like, we were both too drunk to stand. And we were scared, and we didn’t know what we were doing with each other’s bodies.”
Christopher sat up and put his arms around his knees, watching me talk to him.
“We blacked out and woke up the next day feeling terrible,” I said. “He had to work, but it was my day off. I walked him to the subway and said, Kiss me. He did, then he left, and almost right away I had a Facebook message saying he just wanted to be friends.”
“Motherfucker!” said Christopher.
“No, the sadness of that hadn’t kicked in yet,” I said. “I walked home, even though it took over an hour. And I felt so clearly that I had finally lost my virginity. It seems silly, right? It wasn’t the first time I’d had sex as a woman. It wasn’t the first time a lover had stuck something up me, either. It wasn’t even the first time I’d touched boy penis. But fucking him and sleeping in his bed felt special, like something I would read about. And I guess maybe part of that feeling was heterosexist patriarchal whatever. But it occurred to me, as I was walking, hungover in the wind, feeling so in my body—that virginity is not the lie. Singular virginity, that’s the lie. It made me think: Maybe virginity is real, and it can be lost, but it can also be given. Maybe there’s something beautiful in the concept, and not just … ruinous. Maybe the truth is just that virginities are malleable, personal, and there are lots of them. And maybe you can even do them over again if you don’t get it right the first time.”
Christopher was quiet. I’d like to say he eventually said or murmured something before we fell asleep, but I just don’t remember.
Once, when Christopher was drunk, he hit me in the balls. Well, he tapped me in the balls. It was supposed to be a joke, I guess. There was a split second where I didn’t understand where the pain was coming from.
“Haaaa,” he said. “You remember that? You remember that?”
I clocked him back before I even realized what was I was doing and then he was on the floor. He sobbed once, not from pain, I don’t think. He said he was sorry. He said he was drunk, and stupid, and that he was a bad and evil man he was bad he was bad he was bad he was evil.